The smallest Honda four

So was the CB350F the lame duck it’s often portrayed as? I’d argue no, it was simply launched too late to be the devastatingly effective weapon it might have been when stacked up against its peers. Why was it made? Purely because Honda could. Also, in its biggest market, the USA, 350s had always been the most consistent best sellers. Why wasn’t it a commercial success? There’s a whole host of reasons. The simpler and cheaper CB350K3S and K4s did the same job with lower servicing costs and they were arguably easier to ride further, faster. The tiny four needs to be worked disproportionally harder than the twin to achieve a similar level of performance. And another aspect that might have backfired on Honda was the bike’s size. It feels physically smaller than the twins it sold against and in the US of A where size does matter perhaps this prejudiced its potential. Yet perversely the CB350F is almost 20kg heavier than the contemporary CB350K model. If Honda could have sold it cheaper then perhaps the four might have been more popular but a four pot, four pipe bike is always going to cost more to make than a twin. The fact is that the CB350F was 25% more expensive than the equivalent CB350 K twin. The hard and inescapable maths is the primary reason why both the original CB350F and the seminal CB400/4 had short production lives with minimal sales internationally. It’s that last word that decides if a model lives or dies and in the biggest market of all: the Americans really didn’t get the notion of small, expensive fours.